Making Star Wars has revealed that next Friday, July 15th, ABC will air a new 3 minute trailer for “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story”. According to the site, the trailer will debut during the 1 hour special, “Secrets Of The Force Awakens: A Cinematic Journey” which will air on ABC at 8PM.
Don’t be surprised if the trailer appears online prior to the special. We will post the trailer as soon as it is made available.
Dwayne Johnson has just shared on Twitter the first official movie poster for Disney’s newest animated film, “Moana”. Johnson also mentions that we will get a look a the first teaser trailer this Sunday!
Get ready for more Star Wars Battlefront because on June 21, EA is releasing the Bespin digital expansion for season pass owners. The content will then be made available to everyone else just two weeks later.
Players will get to battle it out through four all-new maps featuring iconic areas such as Cloud City, the Administrator’s Palace, Bioniip Laboratories, and carbon-freezing chambers.
In addition to the new maps, players will gain access to a new hero, Lando Calrissian, and a new villain, Dengar the bounty hunter. Both characters will have blasters, as well as their own unique abilities. Lando will be able to “use tricks against his enemies”, while Dengar wields a DLT-19, making him “the first Hero with a heavy blaster so far”.
Two new weapons will be added to the game’s arsenal, the X-8 Night Sniper and EE-4 blaster, though not much else is known about these weapons. Below is a picture of the EE-4 blaster.
Stay tuned for more Battlefront news as we head into E3 week.
Disney has just released the first trailer for their upcoming animated film, “Moana”. Looks like Maui is sporting “The People’s Eyebrow” for fans of The Rock. Check it out:
“Finding Dory” Is A Good Sequel To A Great Movie; “Piper” Short One Of Pixar’s Best
Can you believe it’s been 13 years since Finding Nemo was released? And I thought Alice Through The Looking Glass was a long time to wait for a sequel…
When last we saw Nemo, Marlin and Dory, everyone was happy. Marlin learned to have faith in his son’s judgment and that his son no longer needed his constant protection. Nemo was given the freedom to do things on his own and it created a better bind between father and son. Dory was accepted as a new member of Marlin and Nemo’s family and it was nice to know that she actually was part of a family when previously she just kept swimming aimlessly having no real attachments. Basically it was your definition of a happy ending.
When Finding Dory was first announced I was concerned because I felt, “Does this movie really need a sequel?” The original ended perfectly. Why mess with perfection? I was also tired of Pixar going sequel crazy and not coming up with original animated features, which long ago they were known for. It brought back painful memories of Cars 2. I was not a huge fan of Cars, but the sequel really made things worse for the franchise. In Cars 2, Pixar had a supporting character become the lead in the sequel, and that really ruined the movie. Mater was a clueless, naïve character that was tolerable in the original movie in small doses, but once he became the lead in the sequel, he quickly became annoying because he was always meant to be just comic relief. I was afraid that Pixar did not learn from it’s mistakes and we were going to see history repeat itself.
The good news is that after seeing Finding Dory I did not feel the same way as I did about Cars 2. It’s a good movie, well written and a fun story. The only thing I would say is that I still feel a sequel to Finding Dory was never really needed, but it does nothing to harm the original and Finding Dory itself can stand on it’s own as a good Pixar movie. I would say it is not in the league of Toy Story, Monsters Inc or The Incredibles, but it’s not at the bottom of the list either. It’s somewhere in the middle.
As traditional with Pixar films, we are first treated to their newest animation short, Piper. Piper is a beautifully animated film and in my opinion even more so than Finding Dory itself. Piper is a young sandpiper that struggles trying to overcome his fears of the big world ahead of him. It’s nice to see a movie with talking animals but sometimes it’s even nicer seeing animals being able to communicate to us without words and that is what Piper does as we witness his world from his point of view. Piper does an excellent job of conveying the story with just expressions and emotion and the short is very reminiscent of the best classic silent movies. Hopefully we will get to see more of Piper in the future. I really think that the next Piper could progress to a full featured animated film. Finding Dory may not be ranked at the top of Pixar’s movies but when it comes to it’s short films, Piper definitely is up there.
Finding Dory begins shortly after Finding Nemo where we find Dory(Ellen Degeneres) now living next-door to Marlin(Albert Brooks), Nemo(Hayden Rolence) in the coral reef. Certain words and objects activate memories for Dory of her past that include the memory of her parents (Eugene Levy and Diane Keaton). Remembering that she had loving parents makes Dory journey to find them. Marlin and Nemo join Dory on her quest along with some old familiar characters and some new favorites. Does Dory find her parents? Do we have another happy ending? You’ll have to see the movie yourself to find out.
I’ll get into the good first. Find Dory is not a rehash of the original’s story. It’s a smartly written original story. It can have it’s emotionally sad moments at times, but it focuses more on it’s comedy. Even though the movie is called Finding Dory, Dory is never really lost and I would say a more appropriate title would be Finding Dory’s Parents. For the most part, the original voice cast returns and performs another excellent job.
The movie is a definite upgrade, animation quality wise, from the original. The original was beautiful, but it’s like the animators learned how to fine tune the underwater world to make it even more visually striking. Certain things that I noticed this time around were the reflections of the fish as they came closer to the surface. It looks more realistic and really glad that they found the time to focus on such detail.
The humor is even better than the first. Some of the new characters are very funny, especially the sea lions (Idris Elba and Dominick West) and Becky, the whacky loon. Hank (Ed O’Neil), the octopus that we have seen in trailers, is a real visual treat. I doubt Pixar could have accomplished such a technological marvel in the original, but due to the advancements in CGI animation, Hank movies all of his appendages very realistically and cleverly blends into certain objects with the use of his camouflage-like abilities.
OK, so here is the bad. I felt the movie becomes overly complicated at times. I kept thinking, “How is a kid able to follow this story?” I just think they could have cut some of the scenes out and made it a little more direct. It seems a little bit like Mission Impossible where Dory has to do several things in specific order to get to a location she believes that is where her parents are. Then when she does get there, it’s the wrong place but there are clues to where the right place could be.
Another thing is Dory’s forgetfulness. One of the first scenes has Dory awakening from her sleep going into Marlin and Nemo’s home, the anemone, and being shocked over and over again and repeating the process due to her forgetfulness. It could have been three times, could have been four, but it stopped being funny after two. You meet baby Dori, who is really cute, but just as forgetful as Dory. We get several long conversations with Dory and another character and then Dory is distracted, turns around and says to the character, “Hi. I’m Dory”. It happened a few times in the first part of the movie and I was afraid that this joke was going to be constantly used throughout the film. Fortunately, as the movie progressed, so did Dory’s memory.
We also meet two new characters, Destiny the whale shark (Katlin Olson) and Bailey, a beluga whale (Ty Burel). They looked nice and will sell a lot of merchandise but I honestly think they weren’t needed and didn’t add anything to the plot. I felt that they could have been cut out all together and made the movie tighter. The great composer Thomas Newman returns for the musical score but it lacks the emotional weight and memorable pieces from the original.
The bottom line is Finding Dory is a fun movie that both adults and children can enjoy, just don’t expect it to be better than the first.
I give Finding Dory 3.5 out of 5 stars. Would have been a 3, but Piper is that good.
On Sunday evening, EA held their E3 event called “EA PLAY”. During the show, the company laid out the future of their Star Wars games for the next few years.
Throughout the rest of 2016, EA will continue to support games like Star Wars Battlefront, Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes, and Star Wars: The Old Republic with tons of new content, some of it will even be free! In December, Battlefront will receive a new premium DLC that has yet to be specified, leading most to speculate it will be a Rogue One tie-in.
Things start to get really interesting in 2017, when developers DICE and Motive release a new Star Wars Battlefront game, presumably Battlefront 2. The sequel is said to include a single-player campaign, which the first one lacked. For now, EA has just said that the game will include “significant additions”.
In 2018, players will get the Star Wars game that everyone has been so eagerly waiting for. The team at Visceral, makers of Dead Space, will be bringing an action adventure Star Wars game that is set in an all-new Star Wars universe. The game is expected to have a large emphasis on great story telling, thanks to the collaboration with writer Amy Hennig (writer for the Uncharted series).
Finally, EA mentioned that Respawn Entertainment (creators of Titanfall) is hard at work on a new third-person action Star Wars game. No specific release window was provided for the game, though it was mentioned that this Star Wars title will take place on a different timeline that has not been visited before in anyother Star Wars game.
Disney has released the official poster for it’s upcoming live action film, “Pete’s Dragon”. The trailer for Disney’s Pete’s Dragon will debut online tomorrow!
To celebrate, Bryce Dallas Howard will go LIVE on the Disney Facebook page this afternoon to present an exclusive sneak peek.
A reimagining of Disney’s cherished family film, “Pete’s Dragon” is the adventure of an orphaned boy named Pete and his best friend Elliott, who just so happens to be a dragon. “Pete’s Dragon” stars Bryce Dallas Howard (“Jurassic World”), Oakes Fegley (“This is Where I Leave You”), Wes Bentley (“The Hunger Games”), Karl Urban (“Star Trek”), Oona Laurence (“Southpaw”) and Oscar® winner Robert Redford (“Captain America: The Winter Soldier”). The film, which is directed by David Lowery (“Ain’t Them Bodies Saints”), is written by Lowery & Toby Halbrooks based on a story by Seton I. Miller and S.S. Field and produced by Jim Whitaker, p.g.a. (“The Finest Hours,” “Friday Night Lights”), with Barrie M. Osborne (“The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring,” “The Great Gatsby”) serving as executive producer.
For years, old wood carver Mr. Meacham (Robert Redford) has delighted local children with his tales of the fierce dragon that resides deep in the woods of the Pacific Northwest. To his daughter, Grace (Bryce Dallas Howard), who works as a forest ranger, these stories are little more than tall tales…until she meets Pete (Oakes Fegley). Pete is a mysterious 10-year-old with no family and no home who claims to live in the woods with a giant, green dragon named Elliott. And from Pete’s descriptions, Elliott seems remarkably similar to the dragon from Mr. Meacham’s stories. With the help of Natalie (Oona Laurence), an 11-year-old girl whose father Jack (Wes Bentley) owns the local lumber mill, Grace sets out to determine where Pete came from, where he belongs, and the truth about this dragon. Disney’s “Pete’s Dragon” opens in U.S. theaters on August 12, 2016.
During Sony’s E3 Media Briefing, EA’s new Star Wars Battlefront VR experience was shown for the first time, with more detail and a proper name. Officially titled Star Wars Battlefront X-Wing VR Mission, the game is just that. Developer Criterion Games will be bringing this experience for free to anyone that already owns Star Wars Battlefront on PS4.
James Svensson, a producer at Criterion, had this to say, “You will be instantaneously transported from the comfort of your living room to an X-wing cockpit in space”.
Sony showed off a new trailer for the upcoming LEGO Star Wars: The Force Awakens tonight at their E3 Press Conference.
The Trailer shows some of the best moments from the movie and in typical LEGO fashion, there is tons of humor added to the mix. Check out the trailer below to see all your favorite Star Wars characters interact with each other.
LEGO Star Wars: The Force Awakens is set to release on June 28 for PS4, PS3, PS Vita, Xbox One, Xbox 360, Wii U, 3DS, and PC. In the meantime, a free demo is now avaibale for all PS4 owners. You can now try the game before it is even released!
